


clipped wings make uneasy flight

by jukeboxhound



Series: the fight goes on [3]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Drama, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 05:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13241199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxhound/pseuds/jukeboxhound
Summary: It’s their first major relationship fight and no one’s dead or even maimed.  They’re already improving their communication skills.





	clipped wings make uneasy flight

**Author's Note:**

> AKA, "People Have Some More Conversations about Uncomfortable Things." Title from Archive’s “Nothing Else.” This is helping to set the groundwork for a much longer, proper sequel to “the fight goes on,” so this will probably make more sense if you read that fic first, but basically it's a post-AC "Sephiroth returns!" kind of 'verse.
> 
> Note: Neither character is meant to be purely at fault or entirely perfect. Both do things that aren't necessarily healthy or communicative, but some of it won't be addressed until later.

…

Cloud is sitting in the bar at three o’clock in the afternoon.  At least he isn’t drinking alone.

“You even feeling it?” Cid asks gruffly, watching as Cloud swirls the whiskey in his glass.

“No.”

“Well, suppose it ain’t a waste as long as a man is enjoying it,” he replies philosophically, and they drink together in silence for a while until Cloud starts with, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Fuck,” Cid says.

“When you – uh, general ‘you,’ not _you_ ‘you’ – get in a fight with a, with a partner…”

 _“Fuck_ ,” Cid says again, cutting off Cloud before the asshole can say anything more horrifying, “okay, kid, this is not.  This is not my shit, okay?  But goddamnit.  Fights are…they happen.  They’re gonna fuckin’ happen because you’re different people with opinions and – and _feelings_.  The question isn’t whether or not y’all are gonna fight but whether or not you both want to make up afterwards.  Make the good times good enough that you _want_ to get through the tough ones, and that’s all I’m gonna fucking say.  Drink your goddamn whiskey.”

“You’re not going to tell me that Sephiroth and I are heading down a slippery slope to mutual destruction?”

“Who told you _that?”_

Cloud slouches a few telling inches in his seat.  Cid scoffs. “Look, I think the two of you are batshit for even trying to pull this thing off, but you ain’t killed each other…again…so maybe it’s the rest of us who’re batshit.  Sounds more like that’s something _you’re_ telling yourself.”

Cloud huffs a bit, and Cid huffs right back, because saving the world didn’t make this kid any less of a punk.  “Arguing ain’t the end of the world.  Uh, this time.  Gods, why are we even talking about this shit, I ain’t nearly drunk enough.  Tifa!”

Tifa, who’s been politely staying out of earshot at the far end of the bar, wanders over with a drawled, “You called?” and sloshes some more whiskey into Cid’s glass.

Cid mutters, “Cheers,” and knocks back half the glass.

“You sure you’re not a SOLDIER?” says Cloud.  “Because you should’ve killed off your liver like fifty years ago now.”

“Fuck you too.”

“Let me ask Sephiroth first,” Cloud remarks, just to watch Cid inhale the second half of his whiskey and promptly choke on it.

Barret’s arrival is announced with a door that bangs back on its own hinges and a loud, “Yo, Tifa, where are – oh.  What’re we drinking to?”

“Cloud and Sephiroth had a lover’s quarrel,” Tifa explains brightly, because she’s not above using the continued weirdness of their relationship to its maximum effect, and Cloud groans while Barret freezes in the doorway.

“Get him a barrel of whatever will make him forget the last five seconds of his life and put it on my tab,” Cid growls.

…

Sephiroth is in Seventh Heaven’s upstairs office at a desk covered in papers, more papers stacked in his lap and on the floor like a terrible diorama of Cosmo Canyon.  He’s vaguely wondering if it’s worth the effort to get up for more tea when a steaming cup suddenly appears on the edge of the desk with no warning or reason.

“Thank you,” he tells the air very calmly, and Vincent's voice replies, “You’re welcome.”

Sephiroth waits a moment for his heartbeat to slow down again before picking up the tea and sipping delicately.  “This is good,” he says with surprise.

“It’s a green blend from Wutai.”  Vincent has, meanwhile, come around the desk into view to take up the sole chair still unoccupied by either human body or paper mesa.  “For future reference, if you ever need a favor from Highwind, Miss Kisaragi is a reliable supplier of this particular tea.”

Sephiroth raises an eyebrow.  “Noted.”

When Vincent doesn’t say anything else, Sephiroth mentally shrugs and goes back to his papers.  Or tries to.  The numbers and the legalese seem to be wandering all over the pages, or perhaps that’s simply Sephiroth himself, who’s only half sitting in his office; the other half is shadowing Cloud outside in the night, wondering where he is, what he’s doing, _what Sephiroth did wrong to make him leave, what if he never comes back?_

“Sephiroth.”

“Yes?”

“Have you talked to Cloud since your fight?”

Sephiroth slices him a narrow-eyed look.  “What do you know of it?”

“Very little, only that Cloud was downstairs this afternoon with Cid and Barret.  Between the three of them, I hear Tifa has now instituted a drink limit on anyone with a SOLDIER’s constitution or a history of several years’ hard alcoholism in order to protect her whiskey inventory.”

“Hmm.”  Vincent waits patiently enough that Sephiroth finally admits, “We haven’t spoken since this morning.”  He’d called Tifa before heading over earlier that evening, and she’d politely informed him that, no, Cloud had taken off – again – and that it was safe for Sephiroth to come over and drown his sorrows; paperwork or poison, she said, it didn’t make a difference to her anymore if it meant she didn't have to keep putting up with their bullshit.

“And it’s now nearing midnight.”

“Indeed.”

“Do you intend to stay here overnight?”

“I intend to finish the work on which I’ve been procrastinating,” Sephiroth says, even though he’s never procrastinated on anything in his life.

“Hmm.”

That noncommittal little sound is far more aggravating when one is on the receiving end of it.  Sephiroth grits his teeth and wills the numbers on the page in front of him to behave.  Underlining them, as though the ink could pin them down, doesn't help.

“I have very little experience in this matter.  Your mother and I fought only a handful of times.”

 _...What?_ “What?”

Vincent is staring at the reflections in the dark window beside Sephiroth’s desk as though he can see far past the city lights.  “I loved her to a degree I didn’t know was possible before her, but I could neither understand nor agree with some of her decisions.  Sometimes I wondered how I could justify loving someone who made some of the decisions she did.  I did my best to simply…not think about it.”

Having no idea what else to say, Sephiroth reluctantly prompts him, “Did you ever come to a conclusion?” when Vincent falls silent.

“No.  No, I didn’t.  But if I’d had the luxury of time, I like to think I would have eventually found the courage to face the answer.”

Without conscious input, Sephiroth's hand taps the pen repeatedly against the top of the desk before he says quietly, “Cloud thinks I have a guilt complex.  He thinks it’s interfering with my ability to have a life of my own.”

 “What do you think?” Vincent asks neutrally.

“I think that Cloud can be as blind as he can be insightful.”

“Which one is he right now?”

Sephiroth looks sideways at Vincent again.  “What do _you_ think?”

Vincent’s eyes are as sharp as his claws, their usual red turned a deep brown in the office’s low light.  “I think that either conclusion will have implications that the both of you may find…uncomfortable.”

That restless energy has Sephiroth setting down the pen and standing up instead to pace around the desk towards the window.  “Explain,” he demands.

“If Cloud is blind, it means that you’re vindicated in this argument, but it also means that the one who is both your lover and the person you’ve wronged most can’t be trusted to judge you fairly and therefore your search for redemption is made even more difficult.  If Cloud is insightful, it means that your judgment is the one in question and you can’t trust yourself to see your own redemptive path.”

Sephiroth’s kneejerk response is to punch Vincent’s reflection in the window.  The second is to punch the man himself.  The third is to keep the first two responses purely imaginary through sheer force of will.  He doesn’t speak until he can trust his voice not to come out in a hiss.  “I have a life of my own.”

“Do you?” Vincent asks, mild.  Sephiroth turns sharply, but Vincent doesn’t react outside a long, lazy blink.

“Yes.  I have relationships with people outside of AVALANCHE, some of whom even know who I am.  I have interests.  _Hobbies._ I have a job that doesn’t hinge on a bodycount.  I’m in a domestic partnership that usually approaches something like functional,” he adds snarkily.

“All good places to start,” Vincent says.  “Now, how much of that is directly related to making amends for past sins or to Cloud himself?”

“This is ridiculous,” Sephiroth snaps.  “It hasn’t even been a full year since my return, and the scale of damage I caused can hardly be addressed in that time!”

Vincent is watching him with all the eerie inscrutability of a marble statue. “Perhaps it may be more fruitful,” he says quietly, “to focus first on the damage immediately within your reach.”

“Say what you mean.”

“Address the pain that lies inside _yourself_ , Sephiroth.”

“That’s an indulgence I cannot afford,” Sephiroth retorts stiffly.

“No?  When you are the one sharing the home and bed of the person you also claim to have hurt most?  When your refusal to address your own pain only creates more of it for the both of you?”  Vincent finishes silkily, “What a tricky little paradox you find yourself in.”

This time Sephiroth’s breath comes out in a hiss he can’t hold back.  He stalks away from the window towards Vincent, who’s reclining in the cheap office chair with a still, regal air that abruptly reminds Sephiroth that there are several very wild predators beneath that fragile human skin.  The need for violence drains away as quickly as it had come and he comes to a stop in the middle of the office, shoulders slumped.

“I have had to learn that one cannot live in the past forever, nor live solely for the vindication of another person.”  The weight of too many years hangs heavily in Vincent’s voice, a sorrow and rage so deep that Sephiroth isn’t sure that even Vincent could find the bottom.  He considers what it would take to fill those depths himself and shudders a little.  “But it only matters if you’re the one to make those choices yourself.”

Sephiroth remains silent.

“You might also consider that holding on too tightly to something out of fear of losing it can be the very thing that drives it away.”

Ouch. 

"And if that thing has a tendency to wander away?"

"You might try having a discussion about that."

An old memory floats up of Zack asking him if a requirement of making SOLDIER First was the surgical removal of any capacity for effective communication.  Zack had been referring to something about Genesis fucking off all over the world without telling any of his friends that he was _dying_ , but perversely, something about the memory lets Sephiroth relax his shoulders a bit more.

“Is this what having a father is meant to be like?” Sephiroth asks, staring down at the carpet, and after a pause Vincent says, very carefully and with a note of wondering surprise, “I don’t know.  I suppose that's something we will have to discover together.”

Sephiroth manages a small, tired smile.  “A fresh cup of tea would be a good start.”

…

The fight had started over a broken egg.

“I got it.  You finish breakfast,” Cloud had volunteered, ducking under Sephiroth’s arm to start wiping up the raw egg spattered across the kitchen floor.  Sephiroth had to do a fancy move to avoid smacking the back of Cloud’s head with the hot, heavy iron pan full of cooking egg, diced potatoes, and cheese.

“No, it was my fault, I’ll clean it up as soon as these are done cooking.”

“I was just sitting there watching you anyway, I got this,” Cloud argued.

Even through the calm of hindsight, Sephiroth isn’t quite sure how everything escalated.  Sephiroth tried to very reasonably point out that he should be the one to clean up the egg because he was the one who’d dropped it, Cloud was stubborn in response, and it went back and forth until Cloud was snarling, “If your guilt complex was any goddamn larger we’d have to convert a whole new warehouse to shelter it,” as he stormed out the door.  Sephiroth was left standing alone in an unfinished kitchen, raw egg drying on the floor while eggs, potatoes, and cheese burned in a pan behind him, wondering what the hell had just happened and why it hurt worse than any of the times one of them had actually stabbed the other with a physical weapon.

…

Cloud is mucking out his chocobo’s stall when Sephiroth tracks him down the next morning.  Forseti, tied to a nearby pole on a long lead, chirps out a greeting.

“I hear that you and Vincent decimated Cid’s secret stash of tea under Tifa’s bar,” Cloud comments without pause.

“I hear that you, Cid, and Barret decimated Tifa’s not-so-secret stash of whiskey,” Sephiroth returns, hands casually tucked into his trouser pockets.  He catches Forseti eyeing his hands like he’s going to whip some treats out of his pockets, but he's more interested in looking Cloud up and down; the way some straw sticks out of his hair makes Sephiroth suspect that the reason Cloud hadn't returned home last night was because he was sleeping in his chocobo's stall.  Sephiroth...doesn't feel good about that.

“Eh, you know how it is,” says Cloud with the same forced nonchalance.  “Not like I have to worry about a hangover.”

After Cloud’s dumped a couple more shovelfuls of old straw into a wheelbarrow, Sephiroth says, “Cloud, I apologize – “

“I’m sure you do,” Cloud mutters.

“ – but not for the reasons you probably think I do.”

Cloud stops, straightens, and actually looks at Sephiroth.  “What do you mean?”

“I think my desire for penitence has crossed the line into self-indulgence.  It’s been brought to my attention that sometimes it is less about making amends and more about centering it around my sense of guilt, and that has been taking its toll on both of us.”

Cloud's gaping so hard that he’s using the shovel to keep himself on his feet and Sephiroth has to suppress the unexpected urge to laugh.

“Uh, well.  I mean.  It’s understandable?  Oh gods, stop laughing, this isn’t going the way I expected _at all_ , did you rehearse this on your way over?"

Sephiroth turns his laughter into polite coughs instead.  “Regardless.  I understand that the way I’ve been going about my, ah, _return_ has…not always been the healthiest of approaches.”

“We weren’t – _oi, stop that, you damn bird!”_

Forseti dances a couple steps back to avoid Cloud’s swats, a few strands of bright hair caught in his beak.

“What I’m _trying_ to say, if you and the damn bird would let me finish,” Cloud grumbles, “is that we weren’t exactly blameless either.”

“The two circumstances really aren’t the same, you know,” says Sephiroth.

“Obviously,” replies Cloud.  “On the one hand, complete world destruction, but you weren’t exactly in control of your decisions.  On the other, AVALANCHE made its choices with open eyes.”

“The consequences – “

“Were also different.  Dear gods, Sephiroth, it’s not like you woke up one day and decided that mass genocide would be a great thing to do before breakfast.  It was _Jenova’s_ fault.  She took advantage of you and had you so twisted around you were barely recognizable.  Hojo, too, for that matter - he'd had his claws in you since before you were even born.  Most of the cells and a majority of your own mind were literally working against you."  Cloud chews his bottom lip briefly, then blurts out, "The first time I saw you after I finally got my own head sorted out?  I could tell immediately that it wasn’t you.”

“How?  We never knew one another.  You were a private, Cloud, there was no reason for us to have ever crossed paths before that mission.”

Cloud winces.  “Um, yeah, keep in mind that Zack was a complete enabler, okay?”

Both of Sephiroth’s eyebrows rise. 

“I, uh, had a bit of a thing for you.  I mean, most of it was – was hero worship, I don’t think there was a single kid who didn’t wish they were you, but Zack, he…”

“He thought it was both hilarious and depressing and took it upon himself to do something about it.”  It comes out as more of a statement of fact than a guess.

Cloud winces again.  “Yeah.  Mostly it meant rearranging some of my shifts so I was on duty at certain events when the brass were there.  Harmless stuff.  Oh, stop looking at me like that, I was a screwed-up kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of Mt. Nibel.”

“And a predilection towards stalking, it seems.”

Cloud cringes a little and tries to casually play it off by scratching at Forseti’s crest.  The chocobo coos. _“Anyway_ , my point is that I’d already spent a lot of time watching you, and when I remembered who I was, I could tell that it wasn’t you in the ways that really matter.  Didn’t hurt any less, but it wasn’t you.  So, yeah, horrible things happened, but you weren’t the one behind the wheel most of the time, I think.”

Cloud pauses for a long moment, then goes on quietly, “AVALANCHE blew up a reactor.  We waited until it was just the skeleton night crew, but that doesn’t change the fact that we knew there were people still inside and we blew it up anyway.”

“Intent over consequence?”

“There’s a reason we differentiate between murder and manslaughter.  Not that I would call everything that happened an accident or – or whatever, I’m just saying, we don’t exactly have the kind of moral high ground that Barret and probably Tifa like to think we do.  And that’s not even touching what the Turks did, or the fact that Reeve was a ShinRa board member.  You don't get to be that high up without throwing _some_ mud around in the process somehow.”

“Still not genocide.”

“Still not as black and white as you keep trying to make it.  You know what Zack would say right now?”

Sephiroth can’t stop himself from reaching out to press a palm against Cloud’s cheek like the lead hero in some silly romance.  “’Why should we let you have all the fun?’”

“Damn right.  Let someone else play villain once in a while.”  Cloud smiles, a little fond, a little helpless, before pushing the shovel handle into Sephiroth’s chest.  “But you can make it up to me by finishing the mucking.”

 


End file.
